1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the overstriking of text lines to be justified and more specifically to a justification system operative to expand interword spaces in lines of text and to provide the correct number of overstriking symbols to overstrike this justified text.
2. Description of the Prior Art
One technique which has been used in the prior art for graphically distinguishing a portion of text from the remainder of the text in a document is to overstrike all of the text to be so graphically distinguished with a particular overstrike character such as a slash mark. Consider, for example, a legislative bill in the form of a document having provisions currently left standing after committee votes as well as provisions previously defeated by committee vote. While defeated provisions are no longer a part of the proposed legislative bill it may be desirable, during future voting, for the voting legislative body to be able to view all of the provisions which have been considered during the bill's history, including the defeated provisions. Thus, the defeated provisions might be included in the document but overstruck by, for example, a slash mark. In the prior art it has been considered most desirable, from the standpoint of appearance of a document, to have the overstrike characters spaced somewhat uniformily along the lines of the overstruck text. Thus, it has been considered more desirable than not to have the interword spaces of the overstruck text include the overstrike symbols also.
In the document described above it has also been desirable to provide right margin justification of the printed text. Particularly when 100% right margin justification is performed, the right margin of the document is as uniform as the left margin and the document has a highly desirable appearance in its printed form. Automatic right margin justification techniques typically compare a residue of white space between the last text character or symbol and the chosen right margin and relatively evenly divide this residue among the interword spaces on the line so that the last character or symbol on the line abuts the right margin. It will be appreciated, however, that an inherent problem is presented when text overstruck in the manner described above is subjected to this justification process. The divided white space residue which is distributed among the existing interword spaces would, without the aid of the present invention, result in an exhaustion of the overstrike characters before they reached the end of the text desired to be overstruck. This problem would introduce an error in the intended meaning of the overstriking.
It would, therefore, be highly desirable to automatically achieve a uniform distribution of overstrike characters when overstruck text is justified.